Your right, TomPaine takes you to a not found site. However, if you click on the link and tell it to Open Link In Composer you can actually trick TomPaine to get to the page since whatever that does doesn't trip the TomPaine Not Found page. That page has the following text:
FINALLY, THE
TRUTH ABOUT
BUSH'S MILITARY
SERVICE RECORD
George W.'s Missing Year
Marty Heldt is a farmer. He told us, "I
spent 17 years as a brakeman [for the
railroad] before moving back to the farm.
That job had some long layovers that
gave me a lot of time to read and to
educate myself." He lives in Clinton,
Iowa.
Nearly two hundred manila-wrapped
pages of George Walker Bush's service
records came to me like some sort of
giant banana stuffed into my mailbox.
I had been seeking more information
about his military record to find out what
he did during what I think of as his
"missing year," when he failed to show
up for duty as a member of the Air
National Guard, as the Boston Globe first
reported.
The initial page I examined is a
chronological listing of Bush's service
record. This document charts active duty
days served from the time of his
enlistment. His first year, a period of
extensive training, young Bush is credited
with serving 226 days. In his second year
in the Guard, Bush is shown to have
logged a total of 313 days. After Bush got
his wings in June 1970 until May 1971,
he is credited with a total of 46 days of
active duty. From May 1971 to May
1972, he logged 22 days of active duty.
Then something happened. From May 1,
1972 until April 30, 1973 -- a period of
twelve months -- there are no days
shown, though Bush should have logged
at least thirty-six days service (a
weekend per month in addition to two
weeks at camp).
I found out that for the first four months of
this time period, when Bush was working
on the U.S. Senate campaign of Winton
Blount in Alabama, that he did not have
orders to be at any unit anywhere.
On May 24, 1972, Bush had applied for a
transfer from the Texas Air National
Guard to Montgomery, Alabama. On his
transfer request Bush noted that he was
seeking a "no pay" position with the
9921st Air Reserve Squadron. The
commanding officer of the Montgomery
unit, Lieutenant Colonel Reese R.
Bricken, promptly accepted Bush's
request to do temporary duty under his
command.
But Bush never received orders for the
9921st in Alabama. Such decisions were
under the jurisdiction of the Air Reserve
Personnel Center in Denver, Colorado,
and the Center disallowed the transfer.
The Director of Personnel Resources at
the Denver headquarters noted in his
rejection that Bush had a "Military
Service Obligation until 26 May 1974."
As an "obligated reservist," Bush was
ineligible to serve his time in what
amounted to a paper unit with few
responsibilities. As the unit's leader,
Lieutenant Colonel Bricken recently
explained to the Boston Globe, ''We met
just one weeknight a month. We were
only a postal unit. We had no airplanes.
We had no pilots. We had no nothing.''
The headquarters document rejecting
Bush's requested Alabama transfer was
dated May 31, 1972. This transfer refusal
left Bush still obligated to attend drills
with his regular unit, the 111th Fighter
Interceptor Squadron stationed at
Ellington Air Force Base near Houston.
However, Bush had already left Texas
two weeks earlier and was now working
on Winton Blount's campaign staff in
Alabama.
In his annual evaluation report, Bush's
two supervising officers, Lieutenant
Colonel William D. Harris Jr. and
Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian,
made it clear that Bush had "not been
observed at" his Texas unit "during the
period of report" -- the twelve month
period from May 1972 through the end of
April 1973.
In the comments section of this evaluation
report Lieutenant Colonel Harris notes
that Bush had "cleared this base on 15
May 1972, and has been performing
equivalent training in a non flying role
with the 187th Tac Recon Gp at Dannelly
ANG Base, Alabama" (the Air National
Guard Tactical Reconnaissance Group at
Dannelly Air Force Base near
Montgomery, Alabama).
This was incorrect. Bush didn't apply for
duty at Dannelly Air Force Base until
September 1972. From May until
September he was in limbo, his
temporary orders having been rejected.
And when his orders to appear at
Dannelly came through he still didn't
appear. Although his instructions clearly
directed Bush to report to Lieutenant
Colonel William Turnipseed on the dates
of "7-8 October 0730-1600, and 4-5
November 0730-1600," he never did. In
interviews conducted with the Boston
Globe earlier this year, both General
Turnipseed and his former administration
officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Lott,
said that Bush never put in an
appearance.
The lack of regular
attendance goes against
the basic concept of a
National Guard kept
strong by citizen soldiers
who maintain their skills
through regular training.
Bush campaign aides claim, according to
a report in the New York Times, that Bush
in fact served a single day -- November
29,1972 -- with the Alabama unit. If this
is so it means that for a period of six
weeks Lieutenant George W. Bush
ignored direct instructions from
headquarters to report for duty. But it
looks even worse for Lieutenant Bush if
the memory of Turnipseed and Lott are
correct and Bush never reported at all.
After the election was over (candidate
Blount lost), Bush was to have returned
to Texas and the 111th at Ellington Air
Force Base. Bush did return to Houston,
where he worked for an inner-city youth
organization, Project P.U.L.L. But, as I
mentioned already, his annual evaluation
report states that he had not been
observed at his unit during the twelve
months ending May 1973. This means that
there were another five months, after he
left Alabama, during which Bush did not
fulfill any of his obligations as a
Guardsman.
In fact, during the final four months of this
period, December 1972 through May 29,
1973, neither Bush nor his aides have
ever tried to claim attendance at any
guard activities. So, incredibly, for a
period of one year beginning May 1,
1972, there is just one day, November
29th, on which Bush claims to have
performed duty for the Air National
Guard. There are no dates of service for
1973 mentioned in Bush's "Chronological
Service Listing."
Bush's long absence from the records
comes to an end one week after he failed
to comply with an order to attend
"Annual Active Duty Training" starting at
the end of May 1973. He then began
serving irregularly with his unit. Nothing
indicates in the records that he ever made
up the time he missed.
Early in September 1973, Bush submitted
a request seeking to be discharged from
the Texas Air National Guard and to be
transferred to the Air Reserve Personnel
Center. This transfer to the inactive
reserves would effectively end any
requirements to attend monthly drills. The
request -- despite Bush's record -- was
approved. That fall Bush enrolled in
Harvard Business School.
Both Bush and his aides have made
numerous statements to the effect that
Bush fulfilled all of his guard
obligations. They point to Bush's
honorable discharge as proof of this. But
the records indicate that George W Bush
missed a year of service. This lack of
regular attendance goes against the basic
concept of a National Guard kept strong
by citizen soldiers who maintain their
skills and preparedness through regular
training.
And we know that Bush understood that
regular attendance was essential to the
proficiency of the National Guard. In the
Winter 1998 issue of the National Guard
Review Bush is quoted as saying "I can
remember walking up to my F-102 fighter
and seeing the mechanics there. I was on
the same team as them, and I relied on
them to make sure that I wasn't jumping
out of an airplane. There was a sense of
shared responsibility in that case. The
responsibility to get the airplane down.
The responsibility to show up and do
your job."
Bush has found military
readiness to be a handy
campaign issue.
Bush's unsatisfactory attendance could
have resulted in being ordered to active
duty for a period up to two years --
including a tour in Vietnam. Lieutenant
Bush would have been aware of this as
he had signed a statement which listed the
penalties for poor attendance and
unsatisfactory participation. Bush could
also have faced a general court martial.
But this was unlikely as it would have
also meant dragging in the two officers
who had signed off on his annual
evaluation.
Going after officers in this way would
have been outside the norm. Most often
an officer would be subject to career
damaging letters of reprimand and poor
Officers Effectiveness Ratings. These
types of punishment would often result in
the resignation of the officer. In Bush's
case, as someone who still had a
commitment for time not served, he could
have been brought back and made to do
drills. But this would have been a further
embarrassment to the service as it would
have made it semi-public that a
Lieutenant Colonel and squadron
commander had let one of his
subordinates go missing for a year.
For the Guard, for the ranking officers
involved and for Lieutenant Bush the
easiest and quietest thing to do was
adding time onto his commitment and
placing that time in the inactive reserves.
Among these old documents there is a
single clue as to how Bush finally
fulfilled his obligations and made up for
those missed drill days. In my first
request for information I received a small
three-page document containing the
"Military Biography Of George Walker
Bush." This was sent from the
Headquarters Air Reserve Personnel
Center (ARPC) in Denver Colorado.
In this official summary of Bush's
military service, I found something that
was not mentioned in Bush's records
from the National Guard Bureau in
Arlington, Virginia. When Bush enlisted
his commitment ran until May 26, 1974.
This was the separation date shown on
all documents as late as October 1973,
when Bush was transferred to the
inactive reserves at Denver, Colorado.
But the date of final separation shown on
the official summary from Denver, is
November 21, 1974. The ARPC had
tacked an extra six months on to Bush's
commitment.
Bush may have finally "made-up" his
missed days. But he did so not by
attending drills -- in fact he never
attended drills again after he enrolled at
Harvard. Instead, he had his name added
to the roster of a paper unit in Denver,
Colorado, a paper unit where he had no
responsibility to show up and do a job.
Bush has found military readiness to be a
handy campaign issue. Yet even though
more than two decades have passed since
Bush left the Air National Guard, some
military sources still bristle at his service
record -- and what effect it had on
readiness. "In short, for the several
hundred thousand dollars we tax payers
spent on getting [Bush] trained as a
fighter jock, he repaid us with sixty-eight
days of active duty. And God only knows
if and when he ever flew on those days,"
concludes a military source. "I've spent
more time cleaning up latrines than he did
flying.">
None of the gif links in the text open. They go to a not found set of gifs at http://www.cis.net/_coldfeet/
Do you think this is the reference you were thinking about, or was it something else?
Re Post 113
You can get into the site. Found by looking for posters from the site domain w Bush w AWOL. The site is at http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/
It has lots of gifs of Bush records, but of course not the ones that we are looking for. He does however, make this statement at the top of his www page:
This is not a hunt for credible eyewitnesses and first hand statements. The officers involved have stepped forward. We have their testimony and we have the signed statements of those no longer living.
What ever that means. However, I don't think we can use this to justify Item 39 unless you can find a posting in the some 1000 that DejaNews gets by a search of cis.net & bush & AWOL.
Regards,
Dick